hrtraining

Many law schools are teaching law “as it was in the 1970s”, Professor Richard Susskind, IT adviser to the Lord Chancellor, has said. Professor Susskind said there was “little regard” for technology or artificial intelligence, leaving law graduates “not just ill-prepared for legal work as it is today, but very ill-prepared for how it will be tomorrow”.

The Solicitors Qualifying Exam could be postponed beyond its launch date of 2020, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has admitted. In a further development, the regulator has said it was possible that the all-powerful central assessor of the new exam could also be a course provider.

While the top end of recent law graduates are second only to business students in their earning power, the average wage law graduates receive does not stand out among other occupations, a massive government study has found. It highlighted too that an earnings gap between men and women entering the law opened up at the very start of their careers.

Obelisk Support – the outsourcing business that uses former City solicitors to provide temporary support services to in-house teams and law firms – has hit the 1,000-lawyer mark. Set up in 2010, it has doubled in size in less than three years and founder Dana Denis-Smith said she hoped to do so again in the next two years.

The Law Society abused its dominant position by requiring over 3,000 law firms to buy its own training in order to maintain their Conveyancing Quality Scheme accreditation, the Competition Appeal Tribunal has ruled. It is likely that the case will cost the society at least £1m.

The Lord Chief Justice has signalled concerns about the impending reform to educating law students, saying that a “very broadly based legal education” and law schools “as the centres of excellence” must not be diluted. Lord Thomas said the start of a legal career “must be at law school”.

The Government Legal Service discriminated against a law graduate with Asperger’s Syndrome by refusing to make reasonable adjustments when she took a test that forms part of the application process for training contracts, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has found.

The training reforms unveiled last week by the Solicitors Regulation Authority are “not a panacea for diversity” though they could make a “significant contribution”, a report for the regulator has concluded. The report also warned that the arrival of the solicitors qualifying examination in 2020 would make the training market “more complex to navigate”.

Would-be solicitors will not have to go through the legal practice course and a two-year training contract to qualify in future, after the Solicitors Regulation Authority confirmed it is pressing ahead with its new training regime – but it has delayed implementation by a year to September 2020.

The Legal Services Board has dropped plans to probe why it is taking women and those from ethnic minorities so long to reach senior roles in the profession. It also rejected the Law Society’s claim that it is putting too much emphasis on promoting competition at the expense of the other regulatory objectives it is meant to uphold.

There is a risk that the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s plans for education reform will do little to disrupt the privilege of students with access to funding and other advantages, according to an independent report commissioned by the regulator.

Ulster University launched the UK’s first legal innovation centre last night, bringing together its law school, school of computing and intelligent systems, and global law firms Allen & Overy and Baker McKenzie. It aims to operate at the intersection between legal process innovation, technology and access to justice.

Two law firms have found themselves ‘named and shamed’ in the government’s latest list of businesses that failed to pay workers the national minimum wage – although for one of them it amounted to an underpayment of 50p a week.

City solicitors, regional solicitors, consumers and the Law Society have all pushed back at the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s plans to reduce the two years that students have to spend in workplace training before qualifying.

A solicitor’s passing-off claim against her old firm for continuing to use her name as part of its branding has been thrown out by the court because the law firm owned the goodwill generated by her work. However, she did have a case to revoke the trade mark registered after the firm hired her to set up an employment practice.